Alien life, the universe and everything: Astrophysicist to give public lecture in Halifax

Jason Kalirai will give a public lecture titled Our Place in the Universe on Friday at the Halifax Convention Centre. - Contributed

Nothing personal, but as a member of an advanced civilization on a planet orbiting a star, you’re not so special.

At least that’s Jason Kalirai’s perspective as an astrophysicist who specializes in star and planet formation.

“I think for centuries we’ve been looking up at the night sky and trying figure out how we fit into the big picture of things and what our place in the universe is,” Kalirai said in an interview from the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

“It took powerful telescopes and smart scientists to look up and see that our Milky Way galaxy is just one out of billions of galaxies in the universe. If you look at our sun, we’ve learned that there’s nothing really special about our sun, it’s an average type of star, there are lots of stars in the galaxy and in other galaxies that are like it. And in the past 10 or 15 years we’ve learned that planets don’t appear to be special, they’re just rocks floating around stars.”

About 4,000 planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, have been identified, said Kalirai, who will deliver a public lecture called Our Place in the Universe, sponsored by Saint Mary’s University, at the Halifax Convention Centre on Argyle Street on Friday evening.

“But the punch line is not that number. The punch line is that we’ve learned (on average) every star has planets around it. It’s just we’ve sampled a tiny amount of them to get that number of 4,000.”

Kalirai grew up under the dark skies of Quesnel, B.C., about eight hours north of Vancouver.

“I always looked up at the night sky and was fascinated by what was out there. I wanted to know what I was looking at,” he said. “In astronomy you can go to the library and get some books and answer some of those simple questions that you might have, but it just pulls you in deeper because the universe is just so complex and there’s so many other things out there that we haven’t explored in detail.”

Kalirai graduated from UBC with a doctorate in astrophysics in 2004 after doing undergraduate work in physics and astronomy at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Besides his research work into phenomena such as star life cycles and galactic formation, he also believes it’s important to keep the public apprised of the scientific projects that their tax money pays for. As a result, he keeps a busy schedule of public outreach such theDan MacLennan Memorial Lecture in Astronomy, which begins at 7 p.m.

As a scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute, he’s been involved in NASA’s $10-billion James Webb Space Telescope project, which has been in the works since 2001 as a successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. The Webb telescope will be placed 1.6 million kilometres from Earth past the orbit of the moon.

The project has experienced several delays over the decades but the latest expected launch date is early 2021.

“(Webb) will be able to detect whether there’s methane, carbon dioxide, other gases in the atmospheres of small planets, super earths, a few times bigger than the Earth that are orbiting nearby stars,” Kalirai said.

Scientists are already looking beyond Webb into telescopes that can conclusively determine signs of of life on other planets.

“Those technologies are being created right now,” he said. “We’re hopeful that within our lifetimes we’ll be launching such an observatory and making such measurements to say something about the presence of life on another world.”

Not surprisingly Kalirai has little doubt there’s intelligent life beyond our home system.

“There are billions and billions of planets in the universe, and life would have formed and evolved on some of them. Given the timescales, some fraction of that life would have evolved into intelligent life.”